Models of learning according to Kolb

Four learning styles

The experimenter, like the concrete experiencer, takes a hands-on route to see if their ideas will work, whilst the reflective observers prefer to watch and think to work things out.

Divergers (Concrete experiencer/Reflective observer)

Divergers take experiences and think deeply about them, thus diverging from a single experience to multiple possibilities in terms of what this might mean. They like to ask 'why', and will start from detail to constructively work up to the big picture.
They enjoy participating and working with others but they like a calm ship and fret over conflicts. They are generally influenced by other people and like to receive constructive feedback.
They like to learn via logical instruction or hands-one exploration with conversations that lead to discovery.

Convergers (Abstract conceptualization/Active experimenter)

Convergers think about things and then try out their ideas to see if they work in practice. They like to ask 'how' about a situation, understanding how things work in practice. They like facts and will seek to make things efficient by making small and careful changes.
They prefer to work by themselves, thinking carefully and acting independently. They learn through interaction and computer-based learning is more effective with them than other methods.

Accomodators (Concrete experiencer/Active experimenter)

Accommodators have the most hands-on approach, with a strong preference for doing rather than thinking. They like to ask 'what if?' and 'why not?' to support their action-first approach. They do not like routine and will take creative risks to see what happens.
They like to explore complexity by direct interaction and learn better by themselves than with other people. As might be expected, they like hands-on and practical learning rather than lectures.

Assimilators (Abstract conceptualizer/Reflective observer)

Assimilators have the most cognitive approach, preferring to think than to act. The ask 'What is there I can know?' and like organized and structured understanding.
They prefer lectures for learning, with demonstrations where possible, and will respect the knowledge of experts. They will also learn through conversation that takes a logical and thoughtful approach.
They often have a strong control need and prefer the clean and simple predictability of internal models to external messiness.
The best way to teach an assimilator is with lectures that start from high-level concepts and work down to the detail. Give them reading material, especially academic stuff and they'll gobble it down. Do not teach through play with them as they like to stay serious.

So what?

So design learning for the people you are working with. If you cannot customize the design for specific people, use varied styles of delivery to help everyone learn. It can also be useful to describe this model to people, both to help them understand how they learn and also so they can appreciate that some of your delivery will for others more than them (and vice versa).

See also
Kolb, D.A. (1984). Experiential Learning. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall
Beliefs about people

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That which does not want to be comprehended

Kierkegaard states: "Is it such great merit or is it not rather insolence or thoughtlessness to want to comprehend that which does not want to be comprehended?"

(The Sickness Unto Death)

And then: "to believe is indeed to lose the understanding in order to gain God". All of this is not to say that Kierkegaard is an anti-intellectual or nihilist. Kierkegaard, who once admitted that he "gropes for the tragic in every direction" in a perverse and convoluted desire to "see" God, is just as guilty as anyone of this "imposition" upon God. His intention is simply bringing to light the dynamics of our strange tendencies to unearth the tragic and the role of death and fear in propelling our desire to understand God.

Kierkegaard is not judgemental or admonishing in his treatment of these natural human drives towards knowledge; he just wants to enlighten us on why we act the way we do, and what are the inner springs of our creativity and curiosity.

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Ideas are not transcendent substances

Natorp's interpretation of Plato's Ideas, far from being an uncritical projection of Kant back onto Plato, is a remarkable attempt to dissociate the theory of ideas from its Aristotelian reception, still dominant today, which sees the ideas as transcendent substances, and to argue that Plato's theory is basically a theory of explanation.

In particular, Natorp argues that Plato's ideas are simply explanations, or laws, rather than substances; and what the ideas explain is in the first instance the possibility and nature of thought and knowledge, and only as a consequence the nature of reality. Natorp emphasizes the broadly Kantian origins of his approach, but he takes issue with Kant on a number of crucial points, and this not least is what allows him to defend a transcendental interpretation of Plato's theory of ideas.

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Web today under the spell of what?

Stephanie Strickland :

Of the nine system-processes that characterize both life and knowledge in the 21st century - I refer to feedback, hierarchy, bounds, network interaction, scale, cycles, symmetries, evolution, and equilibrium - it is this last that does not characterize the Internet and does not characterize Web-specific literary works.

If the last half of the 20th century fell under the spell of linguistics and genetics, I suggest that the spatial understanding of both, "genome as book," must give way to an understanding that is inherently dynamic, inextricably statistical, and informationally multimedial in its forms of analysis; an understanding that is less about structure and more about resonance, about the ongoing fitting of moving mind to moving world through moving medium.

My thesis is that Web-specific art and literature is where this understanding is being developed. I hope to demonstrate this with regard to works by several renowned Web artists, but to contextualize my discussion I need to explain scale and level. A sense of scale is key to understanding dynamics, the kind of scaling represented by conventional powers of ten, or some other repeated.

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Retention of knowledge

Walter J. Ong's devotes most of his second chapter of his book Orality and literacy to a brief account of studies done by Milman Parry and Eric Havelock on the noetic characteristics of oral cultures. After summarizing Parry's investigation of the tradition of the oral epic and his writings on Homeric poetry, Ong states that we cannot but be convinced that Parry was correct in concluding that "the Homeric poems valued and somehow made capital of what later readers had been trained in principle to disvalue, namely, the set phrase, the formula, the expected qualifier- to put it more bluntly, the cliché" .
According to Ong the Greeks of Homer's age relied on such formulaic uses of language to aid in the retention of knowledge. Without writing, if thoughts were not expressed in easily remembere d forms and were not constantly repeated, they would be lost.

Ong then explains that Eric Havelock, in Preface to Plato, extended Parry's conclusions to include the entirety of ancient Greek culture. In Ong's words, Havelock shows how "Plato's exclusion of the poets from his Republic was in fact Plato's rejection of the pristine aggregative, paratactic, oral-style thinking perpetuated in Homer in favor of the keen analysis or dissection of the world and of thought itself made possible by the interiorizat ion of the alphabet in the Greek psyche".

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New consultancy

According to Ulmer, subjects formed in an electronic apparatus will not be constructed in terms of self.

The emerAgency is a virtual organization dedicated to using the Internet for a new kind of ‘consulting’. Consulting is one of the principal ways specialized knowledge is delivered to public policy issues. The present state of cognitive jurisdiction restricts the assignment of expertise to problems, reflecting a prejudice favoring empirical, positivist sciences and social sciences as being the only ones relevant and practical to community problem solving. The emerAgency is a deconstruction of this mode of consultancy. The "new consultancy" is not a direct critique of positivist expertise, but is an experimental application of arts and letters methods and practices to policy formation.

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Research results and public access

The more knowledge is freely available, the more participation and innovation occurs and at an accelerated pace too.

Knowledge needs and wants to be free and CERN absolutely recognizes this. If you wish to give concrete expression to these ideas you can always sign the online petition for guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results. In a similar vein, if you live in the UK you might be aware of the campaign run The Guardian newspaper about the scandalous behaviour of government departments charging for information which has already been produced by civil servants funded from the public purse (primarily the Ordnance Survey, Highways Agency and the Hydrographic Office). The paper spawned the “Free our data campaign” which in turned led to a dedicated website.

Apart from the obvious injustice of compelling taxpayers to pay for the same information twice, The Guardian made the entirely sensible observation that this kind of behaviour stifles competition and innovation and cited the case of how Google Earth would have fared under this anachronistic regime. We should not of course be at all surprised by this state of affair in the UK where the same vested interests are controlled by the same clique of humanities graduate mandarins who infest Whitehall with degrees in PPE from Oxbridge and wear their ignorance of and hostility towards science and technology like a badge of pride. The self-same individuals were responsible for the death of the British space industry in the 1950s and 1960s, declaring it to be of no economic use when in fact it was brilliantly innovative and in many respects ahead of the Americans. Anyone who saw the Channel Four documentary on this a few years ago could only be utterly shocked by it.

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Google Knol is now live

Google Knol is now live.

It's like Wikipedia, only written by experts and pwned by Google. Check it out!

Also, I happened upon Everything2, this other weird & interesting hypertext community where anything goes, not modeled on an encyclopedia.

Not necessarily by experts, as I'll be writing a few, but there will be known authorship. It's more a moderated version of Wikipedia. For instance you'll always have nutters who think Buffy is better than Sabrina, but now they won't be able to vandalise the article with sentences like "Buffy shows more more character development in a world where goals are earned rather than the simplistic wish-fulfillment of Sabrina" because I'll have to approve them before they get added to the knol.

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Of course if you do disagree, then you'll be able to make your own entirely separate Buffy knol, which would be a blow if a special interest group wanted to police an entry.

To know the present

We do not know enough about how the present will lead into the future.

Gregory Bateson

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Who holds the future

I don't know what the future may hold, but I know who holds the future.

Ralph Abernathy

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Political evaluations

One also has to consider a darker alternative to hypertextual writing.

If it is possible to imagine academic hypertext as an open system, one can also posit a hypertext project governed by arbitrary rules, hostile to innovation, and largely opaque to its users. Such a system, conceived perhaps on the model of the "learning machines" of previous decades, might present itself as a hypertextbook containing all the information a student 'really' needs to know. The student's paths through this information would be limited to a narrow range governed by binary evaluations: 'if the reader understands this concept then proceed to the next one; otherwise repeat.' Such a system would be a monolith of integrated knowledge. Its navigators (if there were any) would not be trail blazers or generalists but park police and drill sergeants.

The system would not be hyper-"Text" in Roland Barthes' terms, but hyper-"work" -- a code of received knowledge designed to engrave its idea of order upon the reader.

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How knowledge is produced

The general assumptions of post-structuralism derive from critique of structuralist premises.

Specifically, post-structuralism holds that the study of underlying structures is itself culturally conditioned and therefore subject to myriad biases and misinterpretations. To understand an object (e.g. one of the many meanings of a text), it is necessary to study both the object itself, and the systems of knowledge which were coordinated to produce the object.

In this way, post-structuralism positions itself as a study of how knowledge is produced.

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Socializing agent

An average American high school graduate spent more time in front of the TV than in the classroom!

The mass media is a powerful socializing agent. For sociologists significance of the media is not limited to the content of media messages. Media affect how we learn about our world and interact with one another. Media literally mediate our relationship with social institutions. We base most of our knowledge on government news accounts, not experience. We are dependent on the media for what we know and how we relate to the world of politics because of the media-politics connection. We read or watch political debates followed by instant analysis and commentary by "experts." Politicians rely on media to communicate their message. Similar dynamics are present in other mediated events such as televised sports and televangelism. Media is part of our routine relations with family and friends. They define our interaction with other people on a daily basis as a diversion, sources of conflict, or a unifying force.

Media have an impact on society not only through the content of the message but also through the process.

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